> But it would make some things simpler.
It would make some things shorter (but I still don't think that the kind
of test in your exampleis often needed, your expanded example didn't
show a need for it as it didn't show what you wanted in the other case)
However I think that actually this is making things conceptually twice
as complicated. XPath is a language for specifying certain types of
paths through an XML tree. Some simple cases are very simple and others
are more verbose.
DTD content model syntax is similarly a language for specifying certain
kinds of paths through trees. The set of things that are simple and/or
verbose in that syntax is unsurprisingly different.
So it's not surprising that there are some things that are easier to say
in DTD content models than in Xpath, but I don't think the solution is
to just have a combined language, that would again make some things look
a bit simpler but lead to even more complexity and lots of extra rules
to tie down the semantics. In a dtd foo means the element with name
"foo" in Xpath foo means the element with name foo in no namespace.
What would "foo" mean in your proposal? Either you end up with something
that looks like DTD syntax but has very different namespace conventions,
or you have to introduce a whole new set of namespace unaware element
name tokens into the Xpath language. Either could be specified easily
enough but it isn't really a simplification.
David
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